All this talk of sleep had me thinking back to the early days of this blog and my experiment with polyphasic sleeping. Looking back, I feel that it simply wasn’t conducive to a highly active lifestyle or even simply 3x week strength training. It seemed more well suited to a sedentary lifestyle. There must be something to having more than 1 solid sleep cycle in a row that is better for muscle and CNS recovery…
The one method of ‘alternate sleep’ that did seem promising was biphasic sleep. Although my experiences weren’t lengthy enough to form a solid conclusion (in that there wasn’t time enough to analyze strength gains and recovery speed), I felt very at ease with this system. The pattern that seemed to work well for me was the one of our recent ancestors, wherein I would go to sleep shortly after the sun went down, naturally wake up sometime in the middle of the night to work on various mental endeavors such as my websites, and then get tired again an hour or two later, and go to sleep. This cycle ended typically with my body waking me up shortly after sunrise.
This of course could also be altered for a mid day nap, with 6 hrs total of nightly sleep or whatever intuitively feels healthy. I may try it again, who knows?
